New Year’s Planning & Evaluation for Health Care Providers: Setting Yourself Up for Success

The New Year is always a time filled with new opportunities for health care providers, specifically for those who offer medical weight management. Patients are getting messages and reminders from all directions about losing weight, and New Year’s resolutions gives dieters renewed hope and motivation to start off 2020 on the right foot. This is the moment for providers to capitalize on recruitment and re-engagement efforts — so don’t miss out! If you haven’t started your 2019 evaluation and 2020 planning, now is the time.

With 2020 already upon us, you may be in a time crunch if you don’t already have an evaluation plan in place. However, it’s not too late to at least get the wheels turning on how you can take a critical look at your progress from 2019. Use this information to start setting goals for the upcoming year. A quick and easy way to get this process started is with an analysis of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, or “S.W.O.T.”

A S.W.O.T. analysis can be helpful for a variety of different reasons, and you can easily use this tried and true tool throughout the year — not just at the end — to continually gauge your progress towards your practice goals. And, you don’t need to do a lot in order to facilitate this process with your staff and executive team. We’ve provided a helpful template that you can download and edit to guide you through a simple S.W.O.T. analysis.

Things to Keep in Mind:

1. Avoid complexity or too much detail; rather, keep it short and simple and don’t over-analyze. Bullet points are sufficient. Long, overly detailed paragraphs can distract from the main focus.
2. Be realistic: Look at your current situation objectively and see it for what it is.
3. Be specific: Talk through what the core message or issues are and articulate those ideas as detailed as possible. (While still being concise!)
4. Don’t forget about your goals: Apply your analysis to your 2019 goals and see how they measure up. Then create new goals for 2020. Remember the point of the analysis is to start to create a foundation for what you want to achieve moving forward.

A S.W.O.T. analysis can be done with your team over lunch or if your clinic is having a slow day. It can be a fun, yet productive end of the year activity for the entire team to collaborate on collective goals and improvements. So, don’t skip over this important exercise because it sounds too hard or time consuming. The feedback you get from this can be invaluable in setting yourself up for New Year’s success!

Looking for more advice on your weight loss business strategic planning? Visit us at www.Robard.com/Implementation to learn more about our complimentary customer services, including business growth consultations!